by L. A. Morse
My drink was a large one, and I took a big pull at it. Not surprisingly, it was good gin, smooth as satin but with just enough of an afterburn to let you know you’re drinking something.
She took a sip of her drink and said, “Am I forgiven?”
“There’s nothing to forgive. Just pay the bills and be straight with me.”
“‘Just pay the bills and be straight with me,’“ she mimicked. “Jesus, Hunter! Don’t be such a creep.”
I laughed. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Look, don’t worry about it. Your telling him probably won’t make any difference, and maybe it’ll turn out to be a help.”
“Does that mean you’ll keep on working?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Thank you.” Her smile was warm and genuine, and it made her look pretty good.
Shit! This was a woman who could really get to me. With no trouble at all, and without trying. Just by being the way she was. Careful, Hunter, I thought, and quickly got back to the issue.
“You said your husband looked scared when he finally believed that you had hired me?”
“Maybe not scared exactly. More sort of worried. But it didn’t last long. My husband has a lot of self-control. It’s one of the things I hate about him. He’s so mechanical. He—” She cut herself off with a shake of her head. “No, I won’t get started on that. Besides, you already know what I think of him.”
“Why do you suppose he was worried?”
“I don’t know. Because of what you found out? Because I was going to win the battle once and for all? Because I was going to get information that would expose him for what he was? Because he was afraid of exposure? Because he thought it would ruin him? I don’t know.”
It might be possible, but somehow I doubted that that was the reason. What I’d turned up could be embarrassing for Simon Acker, and it could probably get his wife a pretty good divorce settlement, but not much more. Oh, there might be a small scandal, but this was Los Angeles, not some small town, and whatever scandal was created would be forgotten by the time the afternoon papers were out. Surely Acker realized that, and that wouldn’t scare him. But maybe he was worried I’d find out about something else?
“Tell me about your husband’s business.”
“I don’t think I can. I don’t really know anything. Nothing concerning my husband has been of any interest to me for years. Anyway, it’s been mutual, and he hasn’t confided in me for a long time. He’s become a very closed man.”
“He wasn’t always like that?”
“No, that started about four years ago.... No, maybe it even started a couple of years before that. Up until then we’d had an open relationship, always discussing whatever was going on. Actually, it wasn’t bad. Not great, but not bad. But then he began acting strange—saying things I didn’t understand. I thought he was having a breakdown. He was never a very warm man, but he got even colder. I wanted to help, because I still cared for him and for our relationship, but he wouldn’t let me, wouldn’t let me near him. And it just kept getting worse, until three or four years ago he closed up completely. Never said a word, just looked at me with cold contempt. I’ve thought about it a lot since, and I honestly don’t think it was my fault. I guess that was when I really started to hate him, the bastard. And I’m sure he hated me as well.”
“Then why didn’t you get a divorce? You asked, didn’t you?”
“Of course I asked. He would just stare at me for a long time and then say things like ‘It is forbidden’—like he was making a pronouncement. Shit, he isn’t even Catholic. At those times I felt like shooting the son of a bitch. It scared me, Hunter.”
“So why didn’t you leave? Just leave. You could’ve.”
“What, and give him that satisfaction? No way.”
I looked at her and she shrugged.
“Hey, Hunter, I didn’t say it was smart. Just that that’s the way I felt—feel. You want rationality, talk to a computer. But I want out now. I want to go, but I want him to know it. I want him to hurt.” She gave me a crooked smile and shrugged her shoulders again. “So I’m a vindictive bitch? I admit it. But he owes me.”
“There’s not necessarily anything wrong with revenge,” I said, thinking of things she couldn’t know about. “But it can be hard. You can hurt yourself almost as much.”
She looked at me for a long time, her face serious. “Yeah, I guess you’d know about that, wouldn’t you? I think I hired the right investigator.”
That was a tough lady. Maybe a little crazy, but that was okay, too.
“Let’s go on,” I said. “Three or four years ago he closed up. What caused it? What was he doing?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it was, it took a lot of money.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we never had all that much, but we were fairly comfortable. Not Bel Air comfortable, if this is comfortable,” she said, waving her arm at the expanse of living room, “but okay. And then for a while there seemed to be no money. His job was good, but he was spending it somewhere, and spending a lot of it. I never found out where it went.”
“Weren’t you curious?”
“Maybe I should have been more curious. Maybe it would have made a difference, but I couldn’t get anything out of him about anything, and I got tired of trying after a while. And besides, money was never that big a thing with me, not like it is with my husband. He gets off on all this Bel Air shit, like he was some feudal lord.”
“Okay. What happened next?”
“Well, a couple of years ago, Medco was going to be taken over by some big corporation—Megaplex, I think it was. One of the few things my husband said to me was that he didn’t know what would happen when the company was sold. He thought he’d probably lose his job. He was only managing director, and he figured he wouldn’t be kept on. He seemed very concerned about this, and then his mood changed. He got very happy—almost elated—like he’d had some great experience, only he wouldn’t tell me what, just got that sly, mysterious look of his, the shit. And then one day he comes in and tells me he bought Medco—-that he’s the new owner.”
“Weren’t you surprised at this?”
“I guess I should have been, but, again, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of showing it.”
“Where’d he get the money?”
“I have no idea, but we soon had a lot of it, and I became your typical Bel Air matron, dreaming of balling her gardener... and maybe her private eye.”
She winked again with that deadpan expression of hers. The invitation couldn’t be clearer, but I wasn’t quite ready to accept. Did she look just a little bit annoyed as I went on?
“So your husband starts acting strange. He spends a lot of money somewhere. He acts stranger. He’s going to lose his job. Something happens and suddenly he owns Medco Pharmaceuticals. He makes a go of it, and there’s a lot of money and a house in Bel Air and everything else. Interesting sequence.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. Interesting.”
“You think there’s something fishy going on with the factory?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. I noticed she was getting a speculative look in her eyes, and I quickly continued, “Look, it’s probably nothing—just coincidence. Forget it.” Maybe there was nothing there, but it felt funny to me, and I didn’t want her slipping again and talking to Acker before I could do some checking. I changed the subject.
“Have you ever heard your husband mention Domingo?”
“No. Who is it?”
I told her what had happened earlier in the day, and how I thought it must be connected with one of the cases I was working on. She had never seen the big ugly that threw me around, and she was not liable to have forgotten him if she had.
She was concerned about what I told her, but it was clear that she had some trouble paying attention. Her mind was occupied elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the elsewhere was Acker’s secret apartment, about which she wanted to hear more.
I described the place to her in some detail, but she impatiently asked me about the women that went there, I passed on what the pro had told me—the kinds of things that Acker liked to do, the way the girl had to act to turn him on, the way his personality changed when he got into costume and held a whip in his hand. There was nothing very unusual in any of this, but it was like a brand new world opening up for Clarissa Acker.
I took another big pull on my drink and watched the changing expressions on her face as she considered my report. At first she looked surprised and bewildered at this totally unexpected revelation, and then she considered whether this was the information she needed to do whatever it was she wanted to do to her husband. Her expression grew hard as she thought about Acker’s activities.
“...so that’s what he likes... that’s what it takes, the bastard...” she said to herself, but she was clearly puzzled, and she tried to imagine what it was like. Her imagination must have been pretty good. Her eyes closed and her breathing got deeper. Drops of perspiration appeared above her upper lip. Almost unconsciously her hand started to caress her body, running over her thighs, her belly, up to her breasts, and then inside the kaftan to rub her nipples.
Suddenly she opened her eyes, surprised to see me. “Oh, shit, Hunter!” she said, and then threw herself on me, her mouth greedily attacking mine, her tongue moving fast, surging deep into my mouth. There was a kind of desperate urgency to her—almost violent—as though all the frustration and anger and hatred of the last few years had suddenly found an outlet. It was exciting, but also a little frightening—and a little sad.
Her hands were at my waistband, hurrying to get my pants open, frantically grabbing to get me exposed. When she succeeded, she quickly got between my knees, taking me whole into her mouth. As her lips and tongue did their dance, a low growl escaped from deep inside her throat.
She stood up and pulled the kaftan over her head. I was right about her sunbathing. Her tan was dark and continuous. She had not worn a bathing suit in a long time. Her breasts were rapidly rising and falling, the nipples vibrating. The downy hair that covered her mound glistened with the moisture of her juices. She was pretty spectacular.
An audible sigh passed her lips, and she was trembling. She was clearly impatient, almost unbearably so, but she controlled it. She was not selfish. She wanted it to last, and she wanted it to be good for me as well. She came over to me, and slowly, slowly removed my clothes, her mouth and hands lingering over me. Her sighing deepened, her trembling increased, and still she delayed, intent on giving me pleasure before she took hers.
I picked her up and laid her on the fur rug. I entered her in one quick thrust that made her gasp. Her body folded to meet mine and I felt her breasts beneath my chest and her buttocks in my hands as each of us struggled and fought to completely drain the other.
It was all right.
Exhausted, we lay next to each other. After a minute, I got up and went over to get my drink. Most of the ice had melted, and I finished it in one swallow. I lit a Gitane and let it hang on my lip. I looked down at Clarissa Acker, who was starting to stir on the rug. She was something, all right, but I forced my thoughts away from her and back to my problem. I was not any further along, but at least I had a new angle to look into.
She rolled over and looked up at me. She had the smug, happy look of a kitten glutted with heavy cream.
“Oh, Hunter, I needed that. Thanks.”
“Just part of the service, lady.”
She laughed, a rich, throaty sound. “Hunter, you really are a creep.”
I decided that she was a dangerous woman. At least for me. I got into my clothes.
“You have to go?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
Dangerous.
As I left the house, I got the feeling that it was very precariously placed. It wouldn’t take much to push it off the hill, down to the hot, dirty, common level of the rest of the city.
And I wondered if Clarissa Acker would go over with it.
FOUR
I had some time to kill before I could pay my next visit, and there were a couple of phone calls I wanted to make, so I drove back downtown to my office.
The sun was starting to get low. This was always the hottest time, when the accumulated sweat of the day seemed to hang in the air and form an almost visible haze. I didn’t understand it. It used to be desert here, but it seemed to be getting increasingly humid. Probably due to all of the swimming pools. Put together, all the pools must add up to more inland water than the largest lake in the world, and the evaporated moisture couldn’t get past the constant level of smog that hung at 2000 feet. This was getting to be a shitty place to live, and I’d go somewhere else if I thought there was any place better.
After inching through the perpetual traffic jam, I finally arrived at the old brick building where my office was located. It had never been a very classy place. In the last twenty years the area had gone badly downhill and was now a slippery step above skid row. The owners of the building had only made whatever repairs were necessary to keep the place from falling down, but the rent was cheap and the location suited my purposes. At one time I had considered getting a better office, but I couldn’t think why I should. I didn’t need to impress anybody. If my clients needed me, they needed me, and if they didn’t like my office, they could go to some fancy ass in Beverly Hills who wouldn’t touch a job that clashed with his pretty decor. Fuck ‘em. I was selling my guts and my brains, not my office.
The elevator only worked part of the time, and I walked up the three flights of stairs. I shared the floor with the Elegante School of Modeling, which promised dreams of high-fashion glory to starry eyed girls fresh off buses from the midwest and Chiquitas who couldn’t speak any English, and gave them the chance to staff a cheap call-girl service, twenty-five dollars a trick, they keep half. The other office on the floor was the Jiffy Music Publishing Company. In four years I had never seen anyone go in or out, though occasionally a light showed in the crack between the bottom of the door and the floor.
My name was on the door, so I guessed that I was still in business. The door was locked. Maria must have gone home, or wherever it was she went when she left the office. I went in and turned on the lights. I walked through the coat closet where Maria had her desk and that served as a waiting room, into my office. There was my desk upside down and cracked in the center of the room.
I didn’t keep anything of importance in my desk except for a couple boxes of bullets, and I pulled these out of the wreckage. The telephone had been flipped off the desk, but it was still working.
I got my bottle of gin out of the filing cabinet. It was next to my .357 magnum in its holster, and I thought it might be a good idea to start wearing it. If I met the brother of Godzilla again—and I fully intended to—it would serve as an equalizer. Even that monster would find it tough to function with a hole in him the size of a baseball. The gun could probably take out an elephant, but I figured if I had to shoot, I didn’t want to be lobbing marshmallows.
I found a glass that didn’t look too dirty, and filled it halfway with the gin. I took a big swallow, felt it burn as it went down, and poured some more in the glass to replace what I had drunk.
I sat in my chair, put my feet up on the windowsill, lit a cigarette, and leaned back. I grabbed the telephone cord and pulled the phone over to me. I dialed the number for Ellis Maycroft of Spode, Maycroft and Burbary, Stock Brokerage, not really expecting to find him there since it was after working hours. I was surprised when Maycroft himself answered.
“Maycroft, this is Sam Hunter. What are you doing there so late, doctoring accounts again?”
He gave an uneasy laugh.
“Just finishing some work that had to be done. I haven’t heard from you in a long time.”
He didn’t sound especially pleased to be hearing from me now. I had cleared up a mess an absconding junior partner had made, and I kept it so quiet tha
t no one ever knew about it. But in the process I had turned up some stuff on Maycroft that wouldn’t do him any good. As a result, he was a useful source when I needed some information about the world of high finance.
“Maycroft, I need some info on Medco Pharmaceutical Supplies. Go back a couple of years. Especially what was going on around the time of the attempted merger. Also, the status of the company now. Also, anything you’ve got on the president, Simon Acker.”
“Now, Hunter.” He was starting to whine. “That’s not my field. I can’t—”
“Your firm has files on everything. Get one of your juniors to put together the complete story. I’ll come over about eleven o’clock tomorrow.”
“But that’s not enough time. I need—”
“I’ll see you at eleven.... Oh, Maycroft, I promise I won’t smash up your office or do anything that would embarrass you.” I emphasized “embarrass” and heard him swallow hard before I hung up the receiver.
I drank some more gin and smoked another cigarette before I made my next call. It was to Detective Charles Watkins of the Los Angeles Police Department, Narco Squad.
He wasn’t a very good cop, but he was one of the few who would still talk to me. We went back a long way together, and he would always owe me a favor since I had twice saved his life when we were in Viet Nam together.
After being placed on hold and transferred about four times, I was finally connected with the right department and got him on the line.
“Charlie, Sam Hunter here.”
“Sam! It’s good to hear from you. How’ve you been? Staying out of trouble?”
“If I’m out of trouble, I’m out of business. You know that.”
“I guess I do. What can I do for you?”
“You can get me whatever there is on the Black Knight Club in Hollywood.”